MOSCOW, March 14. /TASS/. Russian IT security experts identified fraudulent websites that look similar to the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) website and the state services website and collect personal data on Russian citizens, Angara Security told TASS. All the websites are registered in the Netherlands and have already been blocked by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media watchdog.
The IT security company warns that these domains could be activated shortly before the beginning of the March 15-17 vote, but they are not mentioned on the official CEC website or social media pages.
"The official state services website and the CEC website are available in all regions of Russia, so there is no need to create additional websites for ‘signing up’ to vote and collecting personal data," the company explained.
Angara Security identified some common features of the fraudulent domains: the first part of its name contains the name of a region of Russia, while the second part includes either the cikrf.org or the cikrf.info domain. All the mentioned websites have been registered in Amsterdam.
The information about these clone websites has already been forwarded to the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NCCCI), the company said. The NCCCI specialists, in cooperation with Roskomadzor’s Public Communication Network Monitoring and Management Center have already blocked the abovementioned websites in the Russian segment of the Internet.
The fraudulent websites contain an inquiry to a Google Drive folder, which is supposed to contain a script for processing and transmitting collected data. In addition, these websites are not developed on the "1C-Bitrix" platform, like the official CEC website.
"The third sign [of fraud]: voting station addresses are not being fetched from the official database; instead, they are written directly in the website code," Angara Security concluded.
The Russian Federation Council, or upper house of parliament, officially designated March 17, 2024 as the day of the presidential election. The Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) then announced that voting will take place over three days on March 15-17. Four candidates will vie for the top office, namely New People party nominee Vladislav Davankov; self-nominated candidate and incumbent President Vladimir Putin; Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) nominee Leonid Slutsky; and Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) nominee Nikolay Kharitonov.